Eventide: Slavic Fable Review – Adrenaline Fueled Puzzles

The Good

Exciting scenes add a sense of urgency.

Great mini-games.

Excellent visuals and sound.

The Bad

Some spoken phrases are awkwardly worded.

The world of botany has never been this exciting. Your grandmother sends you a letter from the far off Moorland, requesting your expertise to help save a plant species that’s going extinct. Instead of a baba and her herbs, though, you stumble across a fearsome flying beast and a burning village. Nobody said this was going to be an ordinary day!

Eventide: Slavic Fable starts with one of the most exciting scenes in recent hidden object memory. Instead of tinkering with a locked gate or snooping around an abandoned inn, your car is dangling over the edge of a cliff and you’ve got to escape before it falls. Once that catastrophe is dealt with, it’s on to another heart-pounding emergency, followed by another! Eventide keeps the adrenaline flowing to provide a surprisingly fast paced and exciting experience. You’re still solving puzzles like in any other hidden object adventure, only now the stakes have been raised.

Between putting out fires and rescuing injured children, Eventide: Slavic Fable provides challenge in the form of inventory puzzles, mini-games, and the occasional hidden object scene. Most of your time will be spent investigating the large number of interactive elements in each area. Moving papers aside, looking through books, opening up boxes and sifting through their contents, that sort of thing. The locations are pretty dense, so take your time and don’t be afraid to click on, well, everything. Once you get the items you need, solving necessary puzzles requires only a little bit of lateral thinking, just enough to make your brain stay active.

Hidden object scenes aren’t too frequent, but they provide a nice amount of variety when they do show up. Mini-games are far more common than item hunting diversions. They’re either short and simple or just challenging enough to make you scratch your head. And if you’re not in the mood, a skip option will eventually appear. Eventide also has a massive amount of achievements to unlock, everything from speedy puzzle solving to locating unique hidden items throughout the game. You probably won’t unlock everything your first time around, which is a good thing, since this game begs to be replayed.

Eventide: Slavic Fable does some unusual things to stand out in a crowded genre, but they work. You won’t find the usual pantheon of evil ghosts and goblins haunting the game’s darkest spaces. Instead, Eventide is stocked with traditional Slavic beasts. Since most players couldn’t name a mythological Slavic creature off the top of their head, this immediately gives the game a sense of novelty and originality.

There really isn’t much of a downside to playing Eventide. It’s a good looking game that punches well above its weight in terms of artwork and voice acting. There’s the occasional awkward phrase in menu screens or spoken dialogue, but nothing that spoils the immersion. Overall, the puzzles are fantastic, the mini-games are creative, and the sense of urgency you feel when dealing with dramatic situations is addictive. Eventide: Slavic Fable is the kind of adventure you won’t want to stop playing. Just one more puzzle, because who knows what will show up next?